Thursday, June 26th, 2008
by Brian Daniel Eisenberg
I highly recommend you go to http://whoisi.com and type in your name, handle, whatever you use online as your username. If nothing comes back, create a new entry for yourself. I suggest you use your real name. you can add your aliases, alter egos, and imaginary friends later.
Then start searching for friends. If your friends aren’t on there yet, you can fill in their details for them. It’s like that whole community driven wikipedia-like model thingy.
Here are links to the origins of Whoisi. Here’s a blog post that explains things in a lot more detail. All in all, I’d say this is some very nice new socnet tech. I approve.
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Thursday, June 26th, 2008
by Brian Daniel Eisenberg
I’m a big fan of geotagging photos, but I’m not quite sure how I feel about location-based social networking sites. The only real way to fully understand the implications of geotagging your location and blasting it out to your “friends” (cough cough *stalkers*), is to take these shiny new socnets out for a spin.
I signed up for Britekite when it first went into beta, but it took me just up until about a week ago to spend some time figuring out its inner workings. I’ve finally mastered the basic sms techniques for “checking in” and I’m able to more or less geo-tag myself as I see fit. Here’s a recent map of where I’ve checked in:
There are countless implications for broadcasting this much meta out across the internets and I’m sure this is even more of a problem for women with stalker types, ex-bff’s, and other wacko’s. Security is of the uptmost importance in these geo-location-based socnets, and as soon as the “friend circle” is breached by unwanted lurker/stalker types, the whole thing could implode. Personally, if I don’t feel like broadcasting my location, then maybe all I need to do is just send bogus geo data when I checkin, but that would defeat the purpose.
For now, I’ll continue playing around with Britekite. I’ve got invites in case anyone wants in.
